Academic Events

Topic:

Time&Date:

10:30 am - 12:00 pm, March 14, 2025 (Friday)

Venue

Room D804, Teaching Complex D Building

Speaker:

Xiaoyan Zhang

PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University

Using a proprietary dataset covering all foreign investors’ daily trades in the Chinese stock market from 2016 to 2019, we find that foreign order flows, facilitated by regulatory liberalization through several channels, present strong predictive power for future stock returns, implying that these order flows are likely informed. We track the source of this informativeness and find that foreign order flows significantly predict firm-level news and news-day returns, especially on important days, which suggests that foreign investors can process local firm information. Finally, regulatory reforms that generally relax investment access requirements further improve foreign investors’ predictive power.

Key words: Foreign investors, the Chinese stock market, firm-level news

Biography:

Prof. ZHANG Xiaoyan is the Xinyuan Chair Professor of Finance and Associate Dean at PBC School of Finance, Tsinghua University. She is also the Deputy Director of Institute of Fintech Research at Tsinghua University, and the director of Wealth Management Research Center.

Prof. Zhang received her B.A. in Economics from Peking University in 1997, and Ph.D. in Finance (with honor) from Columbia Business School in 2002. Before joining Tsinghua University, Prof. Zhang worked at the Johnson School of Management of Cornell University as an Assistant Professor, and the Krannert School of Management of Purdue University as Duke Realty Chair Full Professor of Finance, and Finance Group Head. As an overseas high-level expert, Prof. Zhang joined Tsinghua University as Cheung Kong Scholar Chair Distinguished Professor in 2016.

Professor Zhang’s research interests include Chinese capital market, Fintech, empirical asset pricing, and international finance. Many of her works have been published in Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies and other top tier academic journals, and she has won multiple best paper awards. Given her research excellence, Prof. Zhang is appointed as co-editor at Journal of Banking and Finance, and associate editor at Management Science, Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Journal of Empirical Finance, and Financial Management.

Professor Zhang enjoys teaching in investments, global capital market, financial derivatives, risk management and empirical asset pricing for undergraduate, Master of Finance, MBA, EMBA, PH.D. and executive programs. She received many teaching awards from Cornell, Purdue and Tsinghua University. In recognition of her significant contributions to teaching and research, Professor Zhang was named one of the “Global Top 40 under 40” business school professors.